


Drama is in the Genes

by babywarg (morphaileffect)



Category: Doctor Strange (Comics), Iron Man (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Backstory, Fluff, M/M, One Shot, Short, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:01:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23228317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morphaileffect/pseuds/babywarg
Summary: Stephen tells Tony about his mom, an aspiring actress. Tony deduces she's where Stephen got his diva-ness from.
Relationships: Tony Stark/Stephen Strange
Comments: 3
Kudos: 64





	Drama is in the Genes

“Your mom was a theatre kid?” It was a strange thing to bring up in the middle of a fight, but Tony and Stephen had so little time together, the battlefield was sometimes the only chance they had for heart-to-heart talks.

“Oh, yeah. Didn’t I mention?” Stephen blasted a nearby enemy away. “Drama club all the way to university. Community theatre. The works. She was planning to move to LA to try her luck in Hollywood, before she met my father and left college to marry him.”

Tony thought back to his own mother - the heiress, whose entire life had been mapped out for her. She had her moments of rebellion, yes, but all in all, Tony didn't see her as much of an attention hog...

And Tony wondered for a second if she had ever repressed it. If she had abandoned her dreams, and felt bitter about it.

If she had, she never told her son.

“Did she regret it?” Tony asked thoughtlessly, as his repulsor threw back another alien opponent.

Stephen shook his head. “I think that, like everyone, my mother had her share of unhappy moments. But she didn’t have an unhappy life.”

The enemies kept coming, and they had to separate to break up the horde.

Still, Tony heard Stephen’s voice, magically projected into his armor’s earpiece:

”We didn’t always do well, when I was a kid. During lean times, my parents could barely afford tuition for three young kids, much less new clothes. While my father moaned about how hard it was to make money, my mother stretched our meager budget and made it work. We never missed a meal. Our clothes were always mended and clean, hemmed and re-hemmed to fit our growing bodies.”

A pause, and a loud grunt, as Stephen cast a huge fireball that swept away a good chunk of the horde.

As the sorcerer caught his breath, he continued:

“My mother might have had her feet on the ground, but she was also a complete romantic. She liked her weekly ‘dinner theatre’, where she and her kids would play dress up and act out favorite scenes from books or TV. Donna loved those. I pretended that I hated them and found them frivolous, but my mother saw right through me. Some of my favorite memories of her are from those ‘dinner theatres’.”

“What I hear you saying is,” Tony ventured, ”you got your diva-ness from your mom.”

“Oh no, I got it from my dad,” Stephen chuckled, as he and his wondrous Cloak flew back to rejoin Tony. “He was always the family drama queen. ‘Money is everything. Money is life. Status is king’. He’d lord it all over the house, playing lord and master of the manor. You should’ve seen how desperate he was to get into big parties. And then do all sorts of embarrassing things just to get himself noticed by the ‘it’ crowd.”

Tony didn’t get the chance to reply to that: two of the invading winged aliens grabbed him by the arms. It took him a second to break free of their hold and blast them into oblivion.

“Funny,” a somewhat-distracted Stephen went on to say, as he dealt with his own opponents, “I just learned how to laugh at my father when I was in medical school. As a boy, I looked up to him and thought of his melodrama as… _strategy_.” He shot a rain of magical arrows into a gang of aliens making their way toward Tony, disintegrating them all in one go. “In a way, I suppose it was. Just not a very well-thought out one.”

Stephen referred to his parents as “Father” and “Mother.” To Tony, it spoke of a self-imposed distance. It reminded him of how he meekly called his father “Sir” to his face but “Dad,” spitefully, behind his back.

And who was he to doubt that drama was in the genes, really, when flash and fire were the Stark family legacy? Were something he had to work hard to appropriate, as "Tony" and not just "Howard's kid."

With a few gestures, Stephen helped Tony clear away the last of the horde in their area.

“From my mother I acquired a well-developed sense of the ridiculous. I learned how to play any part and not lose yourself in it. How to recognize the masks people have to wear every day.”

Tony lifted his faceplate so he could wipe away the sweat that was collecting on his face, despite the armor’s temperature-regulating capacities.

Stephen seized the chance to lean in for a quick kiss on the lips.

“And how to love what they are underneath,“ Stephen concluded.

He flashed Tony the warmest of smiles, before heading to where the remaining enemies were most thickly concentrated.

Tony let out a small, affectionate sigh, and followed him.


End file.
